exactly the same way that he lives--with his imagination. A boy lives
with his imagination every hour of His life--except in school. The
moment he discovers, or is allowed to discover, that reading a book and
living a day are very much alike, that they are both parts of the same
act, and that they are both properly done in the same way, he will drink
up knowledge as Job did scorning, like water.

But it is objected that many children are entirely imitative, and that
the imagination cannot be appealed to with them and that they cut
themselves off from creativeness at every point.

While it is inevitable in the nature of things that many children should
be largely imitative, there is not a child that does not do some of his
imitating in a creative way, give the hint to his teachers even in his
imitations, of where his creativeness would come if it were allowed to.
His very blunders in imitating, point to desires that would make him
creative of themselves, if followed up. Some children have many desires
in behalf of which they become creative. Others are creative only in
behalf of a few. But there is always a single desire in a child's nature
through which his creativeness can be called out.

A boy learns to live, to command his body, through the desires which
make him creative with it--hunger, and movement, and sleep--desires the
very vegetables are stirred with, and the boy who does not find himself
responding to them, who can help responding to them, does not exist.
There may be times when a boy has no desire to fill himself with food,
and when he has no desire to think, but if he is kept hungry he is soon
found doing both--thinking things into his stomach. A stomach, in the
average boy, will all but take the part of a brain itself, for the time
being, to avoid being empty. If a human being is alive at all, there is
always at least one desire he can be educated with, prodded into
creativeness, until he learns the habit and the pleasure of it. The best
qualification for a nurse for a child whose creativeness turns on his
stomach, is a natural gift for keeping food on the tops of bureaus and
shelves just out of reach. The best qualification for a teacher is
infinite contrivance in high bureaus. The applying of the Top of the
High Bureau to all knowledge and to all books is what true education is
for.

It is generally considered a dangerous thing to do, to turn a child
loose in a library. It might fairly be called a dan